Cloud computing has come to the forefront of information technology, and is being adopted by organizations in all sectors and jurisdictions. Cloud computing itself can be segmented into three types—Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
In a SaaS model, the enterprise no longer installs, configures, and manages the software application on their own premises and computing facilities—instead the software is installed and managed by a 3rd party vendor (the Cloud Vendor) that amortizes the costs of the ongoing management and maintenance of the application across the plurality of customers using it. The enterprise itself merely needs to provide its users with web browser-based workstations in order to access the software.
The challenges facing enterprise adoption of cloud SaaS is the loss of control and governance over the application and data itself. With the application and the underlying information (customer records, orders, employee information, etc.) now residing “In the cloud”, the enterprise may find itself unable to be compliant with jurisdictional regulatory requirements, sector-specific regulations and standards, or their own internal security and data management guidelines. In a number of cases, even encryption is not sufficient for obfuscating the data for persistence in the cloud.
One of the primary barriers to adoption of cloud-based applications (SaaS) is the inability for an enterprise to place sensitive data into the cloud, where it would be external to the enterprise environment and control. For example, Swiss banks must adhere to stringent data protection laws wherein the customer information must not leave the Swiss jurisdiction. Similarly, employee information must never leave the shores of Australia, and personally identifying information must not leave mainland China in any format. As a result, these potential Cloud application adopters are unable to adopt a solution providing for example CRM/SFA (Customer Relationship Management/Sales Force Automation) support available from salesforce.com, because the data would be residing in the salesforce.com data centers in California.
Accordingly, there is a need in the industry for developing improved computer methods and systems, which would solve the above noted problems and avoid the shortcomings of the prior art.